The Last Good Paradise (27 page)

The affairs and casual couplings were beyond naming, counting, or at that point recalling. In public places, he broke out in a cold sweat when an unfamiliar woman greeted him, feeling that he probably had slept with her at some point in the past and at least should recognize her, but it was hard to remember, especially if she was wearing clothes.

He went back outside, ready to work on the song, but when he reached the room again, something felt wrong. He went looking for his new muse, Richard.

*   *   *

Richard had found nirvana in the kitchen, and he felt such bliss in cooking that he didn’t care if he never saw another snorkel mask, scuba tank, or clown fish again for the rest of the trip. How had he banished himself from this joy? He had burned his wax wings against the sun—being a chef, even head chef of a star restaurant, was hard, but not nearly as hard as owning one’s own place. That involved a confidence and risk-taking that wasn’t in him. He should have stayed where he was, content. By pretending, he had gotten Ann’s hopes up and then not been able to deliver. Dex had showed him a book of mythology from the library because it had hot pictures of naked nymphs surrounding the drowned Icarus, but the father’s words to his son haunted Richard:
Do not set your own course.
No one ever told you that in the “Going for It” ehandbook of life.

He was whisking up a light béarnaise for that night’s fish when Dex came in.

“Where’ve you been? Loren’s going crazy with all the views on the cam. Half a million today. Your fans recognized you. Newspapers and TV coverage back home.”

Dex felt shamed by the fact that viewers pleased him. Fame whore. He even had the very un-Buddhist thought that you can’t buy that kind of publicity. He wanted to jab himself with a fork as he wondered how to find out if sales were up. “I burned another song this morning. It felt righteous. It was like a public renunciation.”

“Good, I guess.” Richard didn’t want to be disloyal, but the drama of Dex’s creative life was getting less and less enthralling.

“Wende’s pissed.”

“Women get like that.”

“Thing is, maybe it was a mistake. I want it back. Will you hang with me?”

Richard sighed. As much as he’d enjoyed playing buddy last time, he wasn’t Dex’s girlfriend. He really didn’t want to sit around midwifing through another long night. He had his own stuff to do.

“I’ll make you a deal. Sous chef for me, then I’ll come. Otherwise we’re not eating tonight.”

“Why can’t Titi do it?”

“She says she can’t spend all day cooking. Probably a blessing.”

Dex weighed the idea of returning to the
fare
and working alone. “What do I do?”

The two men shared another bottle of rum as they did
mise en place
, prepped vegetables, and started the base for an angel food cake. This was Richard’s favorite part of cooking, the calm before the storm, and he was glad to give Dex a feel for it.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“What’s it like up there onstage? Singing? All those fans.”

Dex took another long swig. “You know when you have a favorite song, and you can’t get enough of it? You play it over and over? And then, even after a long time has passed, you hear a couple of bars, and it’s like seeing an old friend? You’re right back there, stronger than ever. Well, it’s like that times a thousand. I want to live in that song—not because I wrote it. I wrote it because it was something I loved. It’s like addiction, but not illegal.”

Richard stopped chopping. “Lucky bastard.”

Dex wouldn’t explain how it had changed for him. He wanted to keep the legend alive. “It’s like loving the right woman. I know you understand that.”

*   *   *

Wende woke and cat-stretched out on the bed, watching the sunlight move across the wall. Everything seemed right with the world, whereas only a day ago everything was on the verge of going terribly wrong. She felt chastised and grateful for her narrow escape from being a terrorist. But in her heart of hearts, it wasn’t entirely clear whether she jumped to not blow up a building or to not get married. Luckily it turned out a win-win situation. As she rolled over for her water bottle, she heard paper crunching beneath her.

“What—?” She started to read the catalog of her predecessors, and the landmine-littered yellow brick road of her probable future.

*   *   *

When Ann returned, jittery after her encounter with Dex, Titi had taken her aside and begged her to go see Loren.

“He only talks to you. He’s mad at Cooked.”

Ann was the only one brave enough to intervene. Against Loren’s wishes if need be. This was exactly what she was trained to do, interfere where she wasn’t wanted but was needed. First she needed to find something out.

She knocked on Wende’s door.

“Go away.”

What was it about the place that made them all by turns either too sociable or too solitary? That made them too easily break rules?

“I’m coming in.”

Wende was stranded in her bed, blotchy-faced and sweaty.

“What’s wrong?”

Wende nodded, emotions backed up so she could only gurgle and hand over crumpled, smeary pages.

“Another song?”

Wende shook her head vigorously as if she were trying to dislodge something. “Read it.”

Ann wasn’t surprised by what she found. A side effect of being around Wende was remembering the roller-coaster emotions, everything of life-or-death importance, that went with being in your twenties. “You knew he’d been married before.”

“That’s not it.”

“About the hotel—”

Wende sighed and wiped her face, sat up and put her hair into a businesslike ponytail. “Don’t you see? It’s clear … he’s settling for me. I thought I was settling for him, not the other way around.”

“You’re upset.”

“I’m a muse.
I’m
supposed to be the one who is loved more.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t want to end up like you all in twenty years. You’ve made compromises.”

Ann could have sworn she was going to say, “Grow up.” Instead she said, “We didn’t intend to end up like this. By the way, I’m only thirteen years older.” Pathetic that she had done the math. “What about wanting a marriage like ours?”

“I’ve matured. I see what I see.”

“That was a few weeks ago!”

“Richard’s not at fault. It’s you. The way you flirt with Loren.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It would be impossible to live a normal life with Dex. He doesn’t know what normal is.”

“
You
jumped out of a boat.”

“I did.” Wende folded her hands in her lap.

“Loren said that Cooked and you…”

“Were going to blow up some empty rooms at the main hotel?”

“It’s true?”

“An error of judgment. I see that now. Sue me—I wanted to do something that mattered. Tourism is their cash cow. Kick them where it hurts.”

Ann thought of Professor Faucett. He had been one of the few adults whom she knew who had kept his idealism, without going over to the point of radicalism. “What if people had been hurt? Killed? You could have been responsible.”

“Give me some credit. I
did
jump out of the boat.”

“Their political struggle has nothing to do with you.”

“Everyone says that. Pass the buck. That’s why the world is so messed up. It did get me out of getting married.”

That shut Ann up. What was it about the girl that made her want to throttle her and hug her at the same time?

“I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t stop Cooked. Or Dex. The only thing I could do was jump.”

“The suitcase?”

Wende nodded. “Explosives.”

“Christ.”

Like a pretty little snake, Wende curled up against her. “You need to get Loren to forgive Cooked.”

Ann hesitated, then wrapped her arms around her. “He won’t listen to me.”

“Of course he will. You’re
his
muse.”

*   *   *

Loren sat in front of his desktop, mesmerized. More than a million viewers in one day. For the first time since he’d come to the islands, he looked out to the rest of the world that he had shunned for shunning him. At his age he knew that much about himself: he did not have it in him to fight injustice on the large scale. Unlike Windy—dear, sweet, crass, libidinous, solipsistic, wrongheaded but well-intentioned girl of the plastic-fruit-like breasts—who was still young enough and callous enough to believe she could have some effect, that the suffering of the world could be rectified, that injustice wasn’t a deeply penetrating and intractable stain impossible to lift. That’s why sly Cooked had recruited her. There was still enough of an anarchic impulse in Loren to admire Cooked’s misguided loyalties. He had tried to combine the flammable cocktail of lust and politics, always a hazardous brew.

After her narrow escape, Windy would return to LA and her cocoon of gated luxury among the privileged others, whose only fear was of someday being carried out of that world, kicking and screaming. Give her long enough, she would forget there was a larger world outside her own.

The reasons Loren’s daughters had been taken away were beyond him to rectify. One could regret the past but not rewrite it. Unlike Windy, he would not risk sacrificing his little island of peace. Did that make him a bad man? A selfish one? Possibly. Enough for an adult Lilou to shun. Or did it just make him an average man, so overwhelmed by his own small life, so jealous of his minor freedoms, that he wouldn’t forfeit them for anything past the shores of this islet.

He had just begun to have a name in the avant-garde art scene of Paris and Berlin, which was decades behind Warhol and the Factory, at the moment representation turned the final corner toward the absurd, substituting the meaningless for the meaningful. One of his best-known installations was a camcorder set up in a blank room, recording another camcorder—a serpent eating its own tail—and so the absurdity of his current situation did not entirely take him by surprise. What was new was viewers. In the exhibit, he had had a diagram to explain his intent, based on Lefebvre’s idea of the transformation of space:

L’espace vécu
(lived space)

L’espace perçu
(physical space)
L’espace conçu
(mental space)

He had not intended the
motu
’s webcam as art because high art had to be scrupulously expunged of all human sentiment. Instead it was communion via electronics (
l’espace conçu
), not for public consumption but for private solace. For Lilou. If she watched, then his life (
l’espace perçu
) had some value. What did it mean now that their private father-daughter cyberspace had a million viewers? He studied the small map that counted hits on the website and found they were from all over the world, clustered mostly in North America, of course, because of Prospero’s audience, but spreading globally, with many more viewers from Southeast Asia, Russia, and the Middle East than he would have guessed.

When he was first diagnosed, he had turned to various religious and new age remedies to try to calm the deep panic that had taken residence in his gut. The fear felt like its own tumor, a tumor of regret and anxiety that would kill him if the virus with its attendant bodily failures did not.

He didn’t have the patience for any of it except meditation because meditation was what he pretty much did already when everyone left him alone, when he painted, which was his preferred state.
L’espace vécu.
He found he did not greatly miss the company of others. Illness put on the same constraints as old age for artists; as Degas said, they needed to be selfish about their remaining time in order to create. The superficial friendliness of the resort took care of all his social needs. Cooked and Titi were his
almost
family, although he didn’t treat them as well as he should, but how many real families managed much better? If he didn’t do something, he would lose Cooked to an unlikely combination of debauchery and idealism. Did he still have the energy to try to save the boy from his foolishness?

Loren clinched his bowels as a stab of pain, like a plucked string, reverberated through his body, but then it relented and let him out of its grip. He was losing the fight with
l’espace perçu
.

Hell was other people, but so was heaven. Loren no longer had the time to figure out which had been the greater portion of his life. During the last week, whether it was due to his worsening state or Ann’s constant probing, he felt vulnerable, as if he had been skinned, as if his guests’ desires and problems and petty complaints and happinesses could burrow inside him like a rash, or darts, or worms. He huddled away in his bungalow like a turtle hiding in his shell.

He studied the blue glow of his screen—the view of the beach he could see in person if he only went outside, except on screen he could also see the red pinpoints of all the people around the world who were at that same moment watching that same strand of beach, and it gave him an unexpected feeling of deep connectedness, a peacefulness, that he had not believed any longer possible. This is what he had sought and found lacking in various organized religions, a sense of the sacred, of community. Could one of the pinpoints in France be Lilou? Yes, he definitely sensed her watching. He hated Dex Cooper for cheapening his project, but at the same time he was in awe of this sudden net of connection wrapping itself around the globe. He would never have the ego to appear before his own camera—the idea of the artist entering his own creation was anathema to his sensibility; he was an old dog not willing to learn new tricks, Warhol be damned—yet secretly he could not deny wanting more, wanting six million viewers, twelve, wanting to have the attention of the whole world concentrated like prayer on this minuscule pinpoint of geography, this empty heap of dead coral, because wouldn’t that love disguised as attention be the cure for what ailed them all?